Military was thirsty for 'tea'

Greg Jaffe is co-author of "The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army." This is from The Washington Post.

Spend some time with U.S. Army officers and this much is clear: They are obsessed with drinking tea. At times, it can seem a bit like the military's secret weapon. A young U.S. officer bonds with an Afghan elder over cups of the brew, and soon they are working side by side to win the locals' trust and drive out the insurgents.

Much of the military's belief in tea culture can be traced to Greg Mortenson's memoir, "Three Cups of Tea," a book touted by top commanders and devoured by younger officers.

In recent days, Mortenson has had to fend off allegations that big chunks of his memoir, which chronicles his work to build schools in remote and violent areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, are lies and that he has misused money donated to the charity he formed. He has defended his memoir and denied any financial impropriety.

The allegations are rippling through the publishing industry, which has seen this sort of scandal before, and through high schools and universities across the country that placed the bestseller on their required reading lists.

But the scandal's most far-reaching impact could be on the U.S. military, which was quick to embrace Mortenson's message that one American could help change the lives of Afghans and bring light and learning to a troubled part of the world. His recipe for winning the war on terror was tantalizingly simple: By building schools -- especially girls' schools -- Mortenson and his backers could vanquish Islamic extremism.

"The U.S. military was just dying for his story to be true," said Celeste Ward Gventer, who was a senior civilian adviser to the U.S. military in Baghdad during some of the darkest days of the Iraq War. "They were dying to believe that this one guy learned the culture, earned the Afghans' respect and helped them build a better society."

Mortenson's celebrity in the military took off about the same time that the Afghanistan War started to founder. Officers who had done multiple tours in Iraq but had little experience in Afghanistan went searching for someone who could explain a deeply alien culture to them. "Three Cups of Tea" and the follow-up, "Stones Into Schools," were much more fun to read than the military's counterinsurgency doctrine and carried with them a far more uplifting message. All U.S. troops had to do was learn the culture, show some patience and deliver a little bit of progress, and the Afghans would see the U.S. military's good intentions and turn against the Taliban. In this formulation, counterinsurgency -- a complex, morally ambiguous and frequently bloody type of war -- came to look a bit like social work with guns.

"I'd say the biggest value of Mortenson's work was in creating the 'don't be a jerk' school of counterinsurgency," said Joshua Foust, who worked as an Afghan analyst for the Army. "It would be a shame to abandon the idea of trying to respect the people you're trying to reform with guns and money just because one of the people promoting the concept is shown to be a fraud."

In the near term, Mortenson's stumble will almost certainly lead to greater soul-searching among officers who have been questioning not only Mortenson but also the broader hearts-and-minds approach of this war. And the controversy is likely to spur more discussion about the limits of American goodwill and influence in a place such as Afghanistan.

"No amount of tea with Afghans will persuade them that we are like them, that our war is their war or that our interests are their interests," said Michael Miklaucic, a longtime official with the U.S. Agency for International Development who is currently serving at the Pentagon's National Defense University. "The war in Afghanistan isn't about persuasion or tea. It is about power."